"With features like closed captioning, enhanced content security and transfer and Dolby audio, broadcasters, studios and content providers can fully take advantage of the cloud for professional transcoding," said Jon Dahl, CEO and co-founder of Zencoder. "This gives media customers the tools they need to quickly and efficiently publish video to any Internet-enabled device."

The scalability of the cloud is perfectly suited for processor-intensive jobs such as video transcoding, yet bandwidth constraints can make it challenging to transfer high bitrate content. To address this, Zencoder has partnered with Aspera to improve transfer speeds of large files, and the two technologies will be demonstrated at NAB this week at Aspera's booth (#SL10315).

Also at NAB 2012, Jon Dahl will be presenting at the Amazon Web Services Media Lifecycle Seminar on strategies for handling large-scale video processing in the cloud. The Seminar takes place on Wednesday, April 18th at 1pm. Free registration: http://aws.amazon.com/nab_2012.

On April 30th, important regulations go into effect that mandate the use of closed captioning for internet delivery of broadcast content. Zencoder is the first cloud transcoding provider to support captioning for a range of delivery formats, including Apple's HTTP Live Streaming format for adaptive video delivery to iOS devices.

Today's announcements builds on Zencoder's cloud encoding and transcoding capabilities, ensuring security for professional content, from ingest all the way through media processing and playback. Key technologies available today are:

First, Zencoder is offering its customers a secure transfer tool that combines Aspera FASP transfer acceleration technology along with AES-256 encryption at rest. In the cloud, content is only decrypted during transcoding, resulting in the fastest, most secure transfer and media processing available.

"Zencoder takes full advantage of the scale and parallel processing that the cloud provides, and our partnership ensures that content providers with large files can easily tap the power of the cloud as an extension of existing workflows," commented Bhavik Vyas, Director of Cloud Services and Partnerships at Aspera.

Second, Zencoder is the first cloud encoding provider to support encryption for Microsoft's PlayReady technology and announced a partnership with leading digital rights management (DRM) service provider, BuyDRM. Zencoder worked with BuyDRM to implement PlayReady and the Zencoder platform is now integrated with BuyDRM's KeyOS platform.

"This partnership yields a really efficient workflow. Zencoder's cloud encoding service is the most efficient way to prepare content for the multitude of consumer devices, and BuyDRM helps secure that video for a sound business model," said Christopher Levy, CEO of BuyDRM.

Finally, Zencoder announced upcoming support for Dolby Digital Plus. Both surround sound audio and Dolby Digital Plus are increasingly important as more and more premium content is delivered to the living room via the internet.

Zencoder will be demonstrating their cloud encoding at NAB this week in Aspera's booth, #SL10315.

About Zencoder Zencoder (http://www.zencoder.com) is the largest and fastest cloud-based transcoding service in the world. Founded in 2010, its products enable content providers to quickly deploy Internet video to consumers on virtually any Internet connected device. Zencoder's service delivers a 99.9% encoding success rate, supports the greatest number of input video formats in the industry, and offers the fastest video transcoding available in the cloud. Using a simple REST API, Zencoder's customers can easily access highly scalable, professional-quality video and audio encoding technology without expensive upfront hardware investments or ongoing maintenance fees. Customers include major broadcasters and internet publishers, including PBS Television, IGN, KIT Digital, Khan Academy, TwitVid, Posterous, College Humor, and Yammer. Zencoder is also the creator of the web's most popular open source HTML5 video player, Video.js, which is available at: http://www.videojs.com